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The Sunday Times, 28 April 2013 |
Hugh Canning |
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Konzert, Royal Festival Hall, London, 21. April 2013 |
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A head for heights
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Jonas Kaufmann is not just the leading tenor of his generation, he
is a poet and a painter in song |
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Jonas Kaufmann netted two glittering accolades in the first International
Opera Awards at London’s Hilton on the Park last Monday night. Both the
panel of judges — of which I was a member — and readers of Opera, the
magazine under whose auspices the awards were held, concurred that Kaufmann
deserved recognition: as best male singer and the readers’ favourite. His
popularity — while certainly not yet at the level of Luciano Pavarotti or
his Three Tenors accomplices, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras — was
confirmed by a sellout Royal Festival Hall concert last Sunday, at which he
sang a not exactly populist programme of Verdi and Wagner with the
Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Jochen Rieder, an erstwhile colleague
from his days in the ensemble of the Zurich Opera.
Kaufmann, who will
be 44 this July, is no overnight star. Next year, his career will be 20
years old, and I have been writing about him in these pages since at least
1999, when he became an annual fixture at Brian McMaster’s Edinburgh
Festival until 2006. Although it was clear from the start that he had star
potential, thanks to his gloriously youthful and intelligent accounts of
German lieder — in particular Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Schubert’s Die schöne
Müllerin and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde — his big breaks in
international opera came from the mid-Noughties, as he moved away from the
Mozart and lyric-tenor roles that were his bread and butter in Zurich to
more romantic, even heroic parts. His Royal Opera debut came in 2004, as
Ruggero in Puccini’s La rondine (The Swallow), opposite the Magda of Angela
Gheorghiu, who persisted for a while in claiming that she had “discovered”
Kaufmann during that run of performances, as if hitherto he had been a
complete unknown. That his association with Gheorghiu raised his
international profile is undeniable — his New York Met debut, in 2006, was
as Alfredo Germont to her Violetta Valéry in Verdi’s La traviata — but since
the launch of his first solo album, Romantic Arias (Decca), he has held his
own as the foremost “romantic” tenor of his day. He excels in German,
Italian and French operatic repertoire, as well as being a formidable
interpreter of art songs. This rare combination of talents, allied to an
elegant stage presence and “Italian footballer” good looks — a tad grizzled
now — make him unique in our, or any other, time. Admittedly, the
circumstances of this Raymond Gubbay-promoted Royal Festival Hall concert
were far from ideal for an artist of Kaufmann’s stature. The Philharmonia
Orchestra had played Verdi’s Requiem electrifyingly for Daniele Gatti the
night before. On this occasion, they sounded lacklustre under Rieder’s
competent but uninspiring baton. (It’s a pity that Antonio Pappano, the
awards’ conductor of the year, and his Royal Opera House orchestra were
unavailable for this concert.) Highlights from operas rarely make for
coherent concert programmes, but at least Kaufmann attempted to give some
structure to his selection of Verdi and Wagner solos, which were sung in
chronological order of composition.
Coincidence, perhaps, but three
of the four Verdi operas he chose to sing from have dramatic connections
with the German Friedrich Schiller — Luisa Miller, Don Carlos and La forza
del destino — and, like all good Germans, Kaufmann knows his Schiller. At
this stage of his career, it is hard to imagine him taking the role of Count
Rodolfo in Luisa Miller into his active stage repertoire. It took time for
his voice to warm to the legato line of the opera’s most famous aria, Quando
le sere al placido — no, it’s not a serenade to the Spanish tenor currently
singing a baritone role at Covent Garden. This is Verdian bel canto, and
Kaufmann, with much heavier roles under his belt, is better suited to the
more declamatory style of the later operas.
Despite his stated
preference for the five-act version of Don Carlos in my interview with him
in Culture two weeks ago, he chose to sing the aria Io la vidi in the
rewrite Verdi made for the later four-act version, tearing into the
preceding recitative, Io l’ho perduta! (I have lost her), with despairing
intensity. Even in these operatic “offcuts”, he brings a sense of the
theatre, a relish for words; and his dark, searing account of Don Alvaro’s
O, tu che in seno agli angeli, from La forza del destino, whetted the
appetite for his first assumption of this hard-to-cast role in Munich later
this year. Kaufmann will never be the Verdi tenor of some opera-lovers’
dreams, but he has no current rivals for the brooding Dons Carlo and Alvaro,
both of which hint tantalisingly at his eventual Otello to come.
His
Wagner, on the other hand, is nonpareil among today’s heroic tenors, and
that despite a voice of unusual lyrical qualities in this repertoire.
Kaufmann has the baritonal timbre for Siegmund’s “Sword” monologue and the
breath control to hang onto his cries of “Wälse!” (the alias of his father,
Wotan, in Die Walküre) for a small eternity, but it is his trenchant,
expressive delivery of the text and grasp of the music’s poetry that mark
him out in this role. If it would have been preferable to hear him in
Stolzing’s Prize Song, rather than “Am stillen Herd”, which fizzles out
musically, this was another foretaste of his long-awaited debut in a role
that should be a perfect vocal and histrionic fit when he tackles it on
stage.
The climax of his scheduled programme was a thrilling
Amfortas! Die Wunde! from Parsifal, the like of which I have not heard live
before — even from Kaufmann in Vienna three weeks ago, when he was under the
weather. He generously gave four encores — three by Wagner and Macduff’s
aria from Verdi’s Macbeth — of which I heard two Wesendonck Songs, sung with
spell-binding intimacy. Kaufmann is much more than an opera singer: he is a
poet and painter, with an expressive range and palette of colour unavailable
to most of his peers.
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